AMD has just unveiled their second Vega GPU based product, the Radeon Vega Frontier edition graphics card. Aimed at data scientists, engineers and product designers, the new card will feature AMD’s fastest graphics core to date, allowing users to take full advantage of high-performance computing.

So as you might have seen by now, AMD has a special card for a wide range of consumers. This card will be called Radeon Vega Frontier edition and as with the name, AMD isn’t focusing this at any particular market. In general, this card will fulfill the needs of a wide range of consumers who want to be the first to get their hands on professional grade Vega solutions as soon as they are available.

The Radeon Vega Frontier edition is planned for launch in June 2017 so we can expect more details prior to that at Computex, where AMD is expected to host a keynote on 31st May. In terms of specifications, the card comes with 4096 stream processors and clocked beyond 1550 MHz to deliver 13 TFLOPs of FP32 and 25 TFLOPs of FP16 compute performance. There’s also 16 GB of HBM2 VRAM which comes in two stacks (8 GB per stack). The graphics card has a total rated bandwidth of 480 GB/s which is lower than 512 GB/s on Fiji. It also features pixel fill rate of 90 GPixels/s.

We’ve spent years preparing to enable this next generation of data scientists, immersion engineers, and product designers, by designing a formidable new GPU architecture – Vega – from the ground up, and by heavily investing in machine learning, high performance graphics for content creators, and open software solutions to deliver value to a broad pioneer ecosystem. Today our vision for delivering the future of data science and advanced visualization materializes with the release of the Radeon™ Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards which will be shipping in late June. via AMD

AMD’s Senior Vice President and Chief Architect at RTG, Raja Koduri, stated in a slide that the Radeon Vega Frontier edition has four times more memory than their Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card that released back in 2015. The graphics card featured 4 GB of HBM1 VRAM compared to 16 GB HBM2 on the upcoming Vega card. The new card also packs 3 times more half-precision and 1.5 times more single-precision performance.

GPU Family

AMD Vega

AMD Navi

NVIDIA Pascal

NVIDIA Volta

Flagship GPU

Vega 10

Navi 10

NVIDIA GP100

NVIDIA GV100

GPU Process

14nm FinFET

7nm FinFET

TSMC 16nm FinFET

TSMC 12nm FinFET

GPU Transistors

15-18 Billion

TBC

15.3 Billion

21.1 Billion

GPU Cores (Max)

4096 SPs

TBC

3840 CUDA Cores

5376 CUDA Cores

Peak FP32 Compute

13.0 TFLOPs

TBC

12.0 TFLOPs

>15.0 TFLOPs (Full Die)

Peak FP16 Compute

25.0 TFLOPs

TBC

24.0 TFLOPs

120 Tensor TFLOPs

VRAM

16 GB HBM2

TBC

16 GB HBM2

16 GB HBM2

Memory (Consumer Cards)

HBM2

HBM3

GDDR5X

GDDR6

Memory (Dual-Chip Professional/ HPC)

HBM2

HBM3

HBM2

HBM2

HBM2 Bandwidth

484 GB/s (Frontier Edition)

>1 TB/s?

732 GB/s (Peak)

900 GB/s

Graphics Architecture

Next Compute Unit (Vega)

Next Compute Unit (Navi)

5th Gen Pascal CUDA

6th Gen Volta CUDA

Successor of (GPU)

Radeon RX 500 Series

Radeon RX 600 Series

GM200 (Maxwell)

GP100 (Pascal)

Launch

2017

2019

2016

2017

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Presentation Slides:

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier edition will be available in June in two variants. One would be an air cooled model which comes in a nice blue industrial texture with a glowing yellow “R” emblem placed in the corner. The graphics card come with a “Radeon” label and logo on the sides and front. The back is covered by a nice blue texture backplate. The whole card is powered by a dual 8-pin connector configuration which confirms a TDP around 300W. The card is cooled by a single blower style fan that throws air out of the I/O side exhaust vents.

The second card has also been shown and comes in a brushed golden texture on the shroud. It features the same logos but those come with blue LED lighting. The card is exactly the same aside from the fact that it will feature liquid cooling as shown by the tubing extended out of the front. Some features aside from the looks of the card include:

Machine learning. Together with AMD’s ROCm open software platform, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition enables developers to tap into the power of Vega for machine learning algorithm development. Frontier Edition delivers more than 50 percent more performance than today’s most powerful machine learning GPUs.

Advanced visualization. Radeon Vega Frontier Edition provides the performance required to drive increasingly large and complex models for real-time visualization, physically-based rendering and virtual reality through the design phase as well as rendering phase of product development.

Revolutionized game design workflows. Radeon Vega Frontier Edition simplifies and accelerates game creation by providing a single GPU optimized for every stage of a game developer’s workflow, from asset production to playtesting and performance optimization.

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Vega Air Cooled Model:

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Liquid Cooled Model:

AMD also announced that they are developing a new Radeon Pro SSG solution for large dataset applications, which will be available with the Vega GPU. With 2 terabytes of Radeon Solid State Graphics (SSG), this Radeon Pro technology will provide higher memory capacity compared to existing GPU memory solutions, enabling vastly higher performance.

The new solution is ideal for the next wave of demanding use-case scenarios including real-time post-production of 8K video, high-resolution rendering, VR content creation, oil and gas exploration, computational engineering, medical imaging and life sciences.

The technology allows AMD to feature large flash memory (M.2) on the graphics board along with the local memory that the GPU can send large data sets to directly rather than having it sent over the system memory which has slower processing capabilities. The card uses a Vega chip which makes sense since it is a very beefy card with a lot of processing power. Power is provided through an 8+8 pin configuration.

During the world’s first demonstration of a Radeon Pro SSG solution, 8K raw video timeline scrubbing was accelerated from 17 frames per second to a stunning 90+ frames per second. As content creators rapidly adopt 8K resolution to future-proof their content, a 5X performance boost will improve quality of life, productivity and efficiency in the editing process. Expect more information about these cards at Computex 2017 which is just two weeks away.